40 going to hit the roof of the car or the edge of the surgeon's ear. Quickly I un- folded my arms and sat with my hands clenched in my lap. The doctor sped fiendishly through the gusts of hot air, and soon we were in a suburb that looked as if it had been a forest some developers had destroyed in the nineteen- sixti es. NL of a sudden we were in his driveway and then in the hot black garage. He jumped out of the car and raced in through the door to the kitchen. But I couldn't figure out how to unlatch the seat belt, and had to sit in the tiny hot car in the dark swelter- ing garage and work on it. It would be a real imposition on this man's person- ality if I had to ask him how to unlatch the seat belt. From this trapped position I peered through the doorway into the house. Inside the kitchen I could see there was a hot, empty silence. The doctor forced his way into the dark hot empti- ness of his kitchen as if it didn't exist and yelled this normal sentence to one of his children: "Is Mom home yet?" Into the stillness of the empty kit- chen a boy came out of nowhere and said, "Not yet." Then he disappeared. Did the sur- geon know that if his wife were to leave him this empty stillness and si- lence would be what he would come home to? I managed to get out of the car and followed the doctor through his nineteen- fi fties- style kitchen. Different boys appeared from different passageways. I guessed their ages to be from ten to fourteen. It had to be a hundred degrees in the house, but no windows were open. The boys did not seem to mind the hun- dred-degree temperature in their home and walked in and out of rooms as if it were sixty-eight or seventy. The doctor sat down to read his mail. Although I'd been in this house with these boys before, the doctor had never introduced them, and I never knew if it open the windows in a fit of com- mon sense. Then the dog might jump up. This was all I could hope for- and that she would come home soon. Obviously the surgeon was the kind of man who never opened a window or tightened a screw in his life. If he had, then just on principle he'd never do it in his own home, I could tell. He was used to having things done for him, and like the upper classes in the Arab world, as I'd once heard, he found menial labor beneath him, although he was not any part Arab. But he might as well have been an Arab, since he had his own set of rules for behavior which no one understood. There are experts to explain the behavior and customs of the Arab world. For example, I'd heard that it's an insult to an Arab to show the sole of the foot when one is wading across a river. But the sur- geon's hospital and medical school did not have an expert to explain his be- havior or how to act in his presence. In the same day, one doctor told me, "He has a good heart," and another said, "He has no heart." This has to be the most unpleasant project I've ever gotten myself into, I thought as I tried to make my way back through the thick, heavy airlessness of the kitchen. The doctor was still sit- ting at the table. A view of the kitchen cabinets would be his only view if he chose to look up while reading his mail. But he chose not to look up. He methodically went through his mail, dispensing with this or that piece and yell- ing "All right!" and "O.K.!" every minute or two. I don't even open my mail. I thought about my unopened mail as I watched the surgeon. There were many things I could learn about from the doctor, other than the subject of his ex- pertise, reproductive sur- gery-which he refused to talk about even when, or especially when, I was his patient. His rule was . always to use one word as an explanation when ten words were necessary. A grunt of agreement was would be O.K. to speak to one or two of them. "What's it like out on that porch?" I finally asked a boy who appeared to be about ten. "Is it any cooler?" "You can try, but it's hot there, too," he said. So they an just sat in their hot kitchen and never even ventured onto their porch, which was so rarely used that it was locked. There was no porch furniture anywhere. As I open- ed the storm door, I saw that the little boy was right. It was just as hot, but the air was not as old as the air in the house. Only the dog seemed to mind any of this. He was lying exhausted in a cor- ner of the kitchen floor. Because of the day's weather and the surgeon's be- havior, I had almost forgotten the pur- pose of my trip. I had to look at the dog and assess his development. The out- line of the dog on the floor seemed to be two inches larger than it had been a few months before. Maybe he had gained a pound, but he was the same grayish color as the linoleum, so it wasn't clear what was the dog and what was the floor. Surely the doctor's wife would come home and throw e "" ' o L ;. "Well, then, how about a no-load mutual fund?" r C., \... ......... MAY 13, 1991